Faith, Fun and Family

Mum on a Mission does the £2 a day challenge

I always try to keep my shopping bills as low as possible, whilst still feeding my family well. I try to keep to a £70 a week budget – this is normally £40 in lidl on my big weekly shop, with a couple of emergency trips to ASDA in the middle of the week!

So when I read about the £2 challenge with Zamcog and Voucherbox, I was really interested to see if we could do it. £2 per head per day would mean that my family of 4 would get £8 to spend (slightly less than my £70 a week budget which would give me £10 per day to spend).

Why am I doing this?

It costs £2 per day to feed and educate a child in Zambia. Charity Zamcog are asking bloggers to change the way we think about food, to spend less and try to cut out waste for just one day. In exchange for blogging about this, Voucherbox will donate £50 to Zamcog so they can carry on their work in supporting Zambia’s at risk children through food and education (win-win hey!).

Planning for the challenge

Doing this challenge obviously took a bit of preparation. Here is my menu plan for the day:

Breakfast – total 64p:

3 x weetabix (my husband doesn’t eat breakfast!) – 12p

milk – 50p

1 x tea bag – 2p

Morning Snack – total 54p

blueberries – 45p

digestive biscuits – 7p

1 x tea bag – 2p

Lunch – total 80p

homemade sweetcorn fritters – 50p

3 x yoghurts – 30p

Afternoon Snack – total 82p

4 x individual malt loaf bars – 80p

1 x tea bag – 2p

Dinner – total £4.45

4 x chicken kievs (on offer at lidl) – £2.18

2 x supernoodle packets – 38p

1/2 bag of frozen vegetables – 49p

jam roly poly – 99p

4 scoops of ice cream – 39p

1 x tea bag – 2p

GRAND TOTAL = £7.25

Doing the challenge

Picking a day was hard, as the boys are often in nursery where I have no control over their meals, and we are always out and about making it harder to cook certain things. But what I love about the menu I chose is that I haven’t opted for lots of things that are different to normal, and I haven’t skimped on having snacks or pudding. I have just been able to choose well using the range available in lidl and known that their prices are reasonable. Meat is often the most expensive thing, so by choosing items that were on offer that week (we are always searching for the yellow reduced stickers to put in the freezer!) we have managed to have a healthy and filling meal as a family for a good price.

It has really got me thinking about how I can cut out expensive things that aren’t necessary (chocolate, cookies, takeaways…) and actually how achievable it is to eat on £2 a day. Yes we can afford to have treats every now and then, but those in Zambia don’t have that option. If I planned more thoroughly like I did for this one day, then maybe I could donate more money to those who have no option.

why not take up the challenge yourself? For every blog post written about it, Voucherbox will donate £50 to ZAMCOG so go on! It will cost you nothing but will support children in zambia.